Posts Tagged ‘vegetarian’

The economies in Asia and elsewhere will see around 80 percent of the growth in the meat sector by 2022. The biggest growth will be in China and India because of huge demand from their new middle classes. Chart: Meat Atlas

Nowadays, feed, energy and land have all become scarce and costs have gone up. As a result, total meat production is growing less quickly than before. “The market is growing only for pigs and poultry. Both species utilise feed well and can be kept in a confined space. This means that they can be used to supply the insatiable demand for cheap meat,” the Meat Atlas has said.

“The star of the day is India, thanks to its buffalo meat production, which nearly doubled between 2010 and 2013. India is forcing its way onto the world market, where 25 percent of the beef is in fact now buffalo meat from the subcontinent,” said the Atlas (see this news report from 2013 June).

According to the US Department of Agriculture, India became the world’s biggest exporter of beef in 2012 – going ahead of Brazil. Buffaloes are considered inexpensive to keep by the USDA (what benchmark do they use for husbandry I wonder). Thus the USDA considers buffalo meat a dollar a kilo cheaper than beef from Western cattle. In addition, the Meat Atlas has reminded us, the Indian government has invested heavily in abattoirs. Moreover, faced with the high price of feed, Brazilian cattle-raisers are switching to growing soybeans which has presented an opportunity for Indian buffalo-meat exporters.

China and India differ markedly in their food consumption patterns. In India, a vegetarian lifestyle has deep cultural and social roots. In surveys cited by the Atlas, a quarter or more of all Indians say they are vegetarian. “But the number of meat-eaters is growing. Since the economic boom (my note: usual dreadful mis-labelling here; it is no ‘boom’ but a slow destruction) in the early 1990s, a broad middle class that aspires to a Western lifestyle has emerged (true enough). This includes eating meat which has become a status symbol among parts of the population. Nevertheless, meat consumption in India is still small – per person it is less than one-tenth of the amount consumed in China.”

The costs borne by the environment because of the world’s fondness for animal-origin protein are probably the biggest, but are still difficult to calculate despite some 30 years of following advances in environmental economics. This helps us estimate some damage to nature in monetary terms. It covers the costs of factory farming that do not appear on industry balance sheets, such as money saved by keeping the animals in appalling conditions. The burden upon nature also grows by over-fertilisation caused by spreading manure and slurry on the land and applying fertilisers to grow fodder maize and other crops.

A Burmese family buys paan, a ground-up mixture of betel nuts and other spices wrapped in a betel leaf, from a street vendor near the Botataung Pagoda in Yangon, Myanmar. Photo: Foreign Policy/Drn/Stringer/Getty Images

This is a superlative gallery of street food from around the world. Terrific pictures, great atmosphere, you can almost smell the fried, baked and spiced goodies. A must-see gallery provided byForeign Policy magazine.

South Koreans take their national staple, kimchi, very seriously. There's a museum dedicated to the fermented cabbage dish in Seoul, and servings of it were shot into space along with the country's first astronaut. Photo: Foreign Policy/Aizar Raldes/AFP/Getty Images

Kimchi: When kimchi prices began soaring in late 2010
because of poor weather conditions and a bad cabbage harvest, Koreans predictably freaked out. As prices increased nearly fourfold – it normally costs $4 to $5 for a meal – consumers began referring to the dish as geum-chi, the Korean word for gold, and demanded the government take action.

Pundits lambasted President Lee Myung-bak for suggesting that Koreans try eating cheaper North American cabbage. To head off potential unrest – or even a kimchi revolution – the Seoul city government began a kimchi bailout program, assuming 30 percent of the cost of an emergency supply of cabbage it purchased from rural farmers.

The national government also grudgingly reduced tariffs on imported Chinese cabbage, betting, successfully, that more cabbage would bring prices back down. Fear of Chinese dominance over their national food supply, it turned out, didn’t trump Koreans’ love of spicy vegetables.

The developed world's ever-increasing appetite for meat is turning into an environmental catastrophe, as raising livestock to feed that appetite generates up to 20% of the greenhouse gases driving global warming, according to the UN. Photo: Foreign Policy/Ramzi Haidar/AFP/Getty Images

Insects: Many environmentalists advocate vegetarianism – or at least eating less meat – as a solution. But the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is asking consumers to consider another option: eating insects. An insect-based diet could provide just as much protein as meat (plus key vitamins and minerals) with far fewer emissions, the FAO says.

Breeding insects such as locusts, crickets, and mealworms emits one-tenth the amount of methane that raising livestock does, scientists say. The idea isn’t as far-out as one might think. More than 1,000 insects are already known to be eaten in about 80 percent of the world’s countries, though the idea remains a source of revulsion in the Western world.

The FAO is putting its money where its mouth is, investing in insect-farming projects in Laos, where locusts and crickets are already popular delicacies. A world conference on insect eating is planned for 2013.